Why We’re On Strike

When the Writers Guild went on strike last week, I promptly received an e-mail from my cousin John, who wondered how the writers would be able to hold their picket signs with a decaf skim latte in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other. John, who works for some outfit on Wall Street, sent this message, irony-free, from his BlackBerry.

Follow your favorite NEWSWEEK columnists

Customize the Newsweek homepage to feature the latest word from your favorite columnists.

There is some idea going around, obviously started by someone who doesn't know an average writer, that the average writer is rich. I guess people think that because we work in the entertainment industry, where George Clooney also works, we must be rich too.

Certainly some writers do well for themselves. But it is not the norm: at any given point in a year, a little more than half of all film and TV writers are unemployed. Some of these writers are unemployed because they're not very good. But even for good writers, with track records and connections and the appropriately hip eyewear, there are many obstacles to financial comfort. There are long gaps between jobs; no one buys the movie you spent six months writing; you're a sitcom writer and the public's taste favors police procedurals—or vice versa; or you finally get a show on and you're scheduled opposite "American Idol." This is all part of the game, and no one expects it to be any different. The thing that gets you through these fallow periods is the residual.

A residual is like an author's royalty. We are paid them whenever our work is shown on TV. They are a key part of how a writer survives between jobs, and it is an eminently fair idea: when the network (or studio) makes money off our work, so do we. If nobody airs your show or reruns your movie, there is no residual. If the network isn't making money off it, neither are we.

The residual has been established practice since 1960, when the Writers Guild first went on strike for it. Before that no one was given residuals. The writers of the imperishably entertaining "I Love Lucy," a show that has run without stop, making hundreds of millions of dollars for its owners, have never received royalties for that work. Nor have the writers of that other masterpiece of '50s home life, "The Honeymooners." The networks argued then that there was no precedent for it, that the medium was too new. To the studios the idea of equitable payment for writers always seems new.

But peace was made, after the sacrifices of the dedicated people in that strike, and a formula was set that worked for a long time. When video came into being, a new accommodation was made, allowing a small residual for tapes and then DVDs. I am not being hyperbolic when I say "small." For a DVD sold for $19.99, we are paid 4 cents. To put that in perspective, that means that to pay for one tank of gas, a writer needs to sell 1,500 DVDs. To put it another way, it's a penny less than if we returned an empty can of Coke.